The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

by Steven Sloman, Philip Fernbach Narrated by Mike Chamberlain

Overview

"The Knowledge Illusion is filled with insights on how we should deal with our individual ignorance and collective wisdom." -Steven Pinker

We all think we know more than we actually do.
 
Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don't even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We're constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact-and usually we don't even realize we're doing it.
 
The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individually oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail. But our collaborative minds also enable us to do amazing things. This book contends that true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using the world around us.

Editorial Reviews

JUNE 2017 - AudioFile

Narrator Mike Chamberlain’s optimistic voice keeps the tone light in this extensive look at how good thinking depends on the interplay of many factors outside our individual brains. His flawless phrasing and enunciation give this audio appealing clarity and impact. Written with a breezy tone by two academic psychologists, the audiobook covers the way we acquire a broad range of knowledge—from an understanding of modern-day machines to opinions on hot political issues like global warming or taxation policy. The authors effectively argue for humility regarding what we really know, and more appreciation for the ways the outside world, especially other people, can help us understand the world and make it better. Their political and philosophical sensibilities offset the cognitive science details to make this a powerful guide to becoming better citizens as well as thinkers. T.W. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

11/14/2016
Sloman, a professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences, and Fernbach, a cognitive scientist and professor of marketing, attempt nothing less than a takedown of widely held beliefs about intelligence and knowledge, namely the role of an individual’s brain as the main center for knowledge. Using a mixture of stories and science from an array of disciplines, the authors present a compelling and entertaining examination of the gap between knowledge one thinks one has and the amount of knowledge actually held in the brain, seeking to “explain how human thinking can be so shallow and so powerful at the same time.” The book starts with revelatory scholarly insights into the relationship between knowledge and the brain, finding that humans “are largely unaware of how little we understand.” Sloman and Fernbach then take the reader through numerous real-life applications of their findings, such as the implications for non-experts’ understanding of science, politics, and personal finances. In an increasingly polarized culture where certainty reigns supreme, a book advocating intellectual humility and recognition of the limits of understanding feels both revolutionary and necessary. The fact that it’s a fun and engaging page-turner is a bonus benefit for the reader. Agent: Christy Fletcher, Fletcher and Co. (Mar.)

From the Publisher

In The Knowledge Illusion, the cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach hammer another nail into the coffin of the rational individual... positing that not just rationality but the very idea of individual thinking is a myth.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Sloman and Fernbach offer clever demonstrations of how much we take for granted, and how little we actually understand... The book is stimulating, and any explanation of our current malaise that attributes it to cognitive failures—rather than putting it down to the moral wickedness of one group or another—is most welcome. Sloman and Fernbach are working to uproot a very important problem... [The Knowledge Illusion is] written with vigour and humanity.” —Financial Times

“The Knowledge Illusion is at once both obvious and profound: the limitations of the mind are no surprise, but the problem is that people so rarely think about them... In the context of partisan bubbles and fake news, the authors bring a necessary shot of humility: be sceptical of your own knowledge, and the wisdom of your crowd.” —The Economist

“A breezy guide to the mechanisms of human intelligence.” —Psychology Today

“In an increasingly polarized culture where certainty reigns supreme, a book advocating intellectual humility and recognition of the limits of understanding feels both revolutionary and necessary. The fact that it’s a fun and engaging page-turner is a bonus benefit for the reader.” —Publishers Weekly

“An utterly fascinating and unsettling book, The Knowledge Illusion shows us how everything we know is bound together with knowledge of others. Sloman and Fernbach break down many of our assumptions about science, how we think and how we know anything at all about the world in which we live. Despite the wide-scale deconstruction, the authors are upbeat... Anyone engaged in the work of nurturing healthy and flourishing communities will ultimately have to wrestle with the questions posed in this book. Sloman and Fernbach help us to do so gracefully, acknowledging the truth of how little we know, and finding hope in this precarious situation.” —Relevant Magazine

“We all know less than we think we do, including how much we know about how much we know. There’s no cure for this condition, but there is a treatment: this fascinating book. The Knowledge Illusion is filled with insights on how we should deal with our individual ignorance and collective wisdom.” —Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works and The Stuff of Thought

“I love this book. A brilliant, eye-opening treatment of how little each of us knows, and how much all of us know. It's magnificent, and it's also a lot of fun. Read it!” —Cass R. Sunstein, coauthor of Nudge and founder and director, Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy, Harvard Law School

Library Journal

03/01/2017
General readers who like the work of Malcolm Gladwell will enjoy this book.--Mary Ann Hughes, Shelton, WA

JUNE 2017 - AudioFile

Narrator Mike Chamberlain’s optimistic voice keeps the tone light in this extensive look at how good thinking depends on the interplay of many factors outside our individual brains. His flawless phrasing and enunciation give this audio appealing clarity and impact. Written with a breezy tone by two academic psychologists, the audiobook covers the way we acquire a broad range of knowledge—from an understanding of modern-day machines to opinions on hot political issues like global warming or taxation policy. The authors effectively argue for humility regarding what we really know, and more appreciation for the ways the outside world, especially other people, can help us understand the world and make it better. Their political and philosophical sensibilities offset the cognitive science details to make this a powerful guide to becoming better citizens as well as thinkers. T.W. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2016-12-26
A tour of the many honeycombs of the hive mind, courtesy of cognitive scientists Sloman (Brown Univ.) and Fernbach (Univ. of Colorado).You know more than I do, and you know next to nothing yourself. That's not just a Socratic proposition, but also a finding of recent generations of neuroscientific researchers, who, as Cognition editor Sloman notes, are given to addressing a large question: "How is thinking possible?" One answer is that much of our thinking relies on the thinking of others—and, increasingly, on machine others. As the authors note, flying a plane is a collaboration among pilots, designers, engineers, flight controllers, and automated systems, the collective mastery or even understanding of all of which is beyond the capacity of all but a very few humans. One thought experiment the authors propose is to produce from your mind everything you can say about how zippers work, a sobering exercise that quickly reveals the superficiality of much of what we carry inside our heads. We think we know, and then we don't. Therein lies a small key to wisdom, and this leads to a larger purpose, which is that traditional assessments of intelligence and performance are off-point: what matters is what the individual mind contributes to the collectivity. If that sounds vaguely collectivist, so be it. All the same, the authors maintain, "intelligence is no longer a person's ability to reason and solve problems; it's how much the person contributes to a group's reasoning and problem-solving process." This contribution, they add, may not just lie in creativity, but also in doing the grunt work necessary to move a project along. After all, even with better, more effectively distributed thinking, "ignorance is inevitable." Some of the book seems self-evident, some seems to be mere padding, and little of it moves with the sparkling aha intelligence of Daniel Dennett. Still, it's sturdy enough, with interesting insights, especially for team building.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172022364
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	03/14/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

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